Джон Макдональд - The Last One Left

By then the pattern had become familiar. Carrie’s pattern. It set up the usual side effects. Carolyn would be poisonously and damagingly sweet to Stella, ignore her husband completely, and flirt quite openly with Captain Staniker. Bix, suffering rejection, would take every chance to stomp on his son Roger’s pride, pointing out everything Roger seemed incompetent to do, from catching a fish to making a drink. Roger would go about with the stiff-mouthed look of someone fighting tears of helplessness. Mary Jane Staniker would keep her head down and go about her chores with a scuttling look. Staniker, by making an extra effort to be protective and gentle with Stella, would inadvertently add to Carolyn’s sour mood. And Leila would make an extra effort to stay out of everybody’s way. She was in awe of Carolyn’s special talent to make six other adults as miserable as herself.

In the morning Carrie had Staniker launch and rig the little sailing dinghy, and she went off alone, up and down the protected waters in the light air, managing to look rigidly discontented as far as the eye could see. Mister Bix and Captain Staniker went off in the Muñequita to troll on the Atlantic side, Bix making it clear that Roger would be an unwelcome nuisance to take along. Leila had put her writing materials in a plastic bag and swum ashore. She went to a pebbly beach at the south end of the island where the slope of rock and scrub growth behind her concealed the anchorage where the Muñeca lay. As she sat with her bare back against a smooth and comfortable slant of stone, she could see Stel on her plastic float-board paddling slowly back and forth over a coral reef, looking down through the little glass porthole. She finished another two pages of a letter to Jonathan, thinking she would probably add more before mailing it from Nassau.

The heat of the sun finally made her uncomfortable enough to think of getting back into the water. Stella came paddling to the beach and came walking ashore, carrying the light foam board under her arm.

Stella limped badly. She had been Leila’s friend for years. Leila had realized in the very beginning with this strange, shy girl that any kind of special consideration made her become remote. So she had treated her as if there was no handicap. And, indeed, there was far less of one than Stella believed. Leila knew the history of it. It had been a difficult delivery. The nerves of the left leg had been damaged. By the time the specialists had achieved a sufficient regeneration to give her the use of it, the leg was smaller around and shorter than the other leg, and it would never be very strong. Both legs were pretty, slender, shapely. They did not match. That was all. Her figure was very good. She had a delicate and sensitive face, lovely eyes which seldom looked directly at anyone. She had a dark, brooding look, and only the very few who knew her as well as Leila knew the quickness of the hidden humor, the taste for the absurd.

Only once on the cruise had Leila made an effort to comfort Stel. Carolyn, one night at dinner, had been exceptionally, cleverly vicious. She talked about bringing “poor Stel” out of herself. She seemed incapable of saying her name without adding the “poor,” and she would jump to Stel’s assistance when she least needed it. Leila awoke in the night in the cabin she shared with Stel to hear the smothered sound of weeping. So she had stepped over to the adjoining bunk and slid in with her and held her. Stel had been rigid at first, and then had softened and clung and wept herself out. It had made Stel strange toward her for the next few days, but then they had found their way back to the casual warmth they knew best.

Stel dropped the board and sat on it and said, “Madame the Queen is really winging it today.”

“Whatever it is, if somebody could bottle it, you could use it to destroy empires. Your father ought to give her a good thumping.”

She made a face. “He’d rather thump on Roger. My dear daddy made his own bed like they say. I guess the daughter-daddy bit clouds my vision, but he acts so damned — goaty about her. She keeps him on the hook. She makes his hands shake. Years married and still it goes on. He’s scared to thump her, Leila. She wouldn’t let him near her for a year. Anyway, thank God Garry’s got the sense to steer clear of her.”

“It’s Garry now? Gracious me!”

“Oh, come on! He’s a nice guy, Leila. A really truly nice guy. And this cruise is rough on him and his wife. I’m glad they’re getting paid well at least. A happy ship. Ho, ho, ho and a bottle of arsenic. Honest, I’m sorry I dragged you along, but I think if you hadn’t been along, I’d have jumped overboard a long time ago.”

“Oh sure. You know, for a guy who’s supposed to have been captaining for years, Staniker seems sort of keyed up and twitchy to me.”

“Darling, the Kayd family does that to everyone. It’s our proudest boast.” She paused. “I guess what really gets me is what Carrie does to daddy. He is so strong in every other way. And she keeps him groveling around whenever she feels like it. She keeps putting the knife in me to see if she can get a rise out of him. When he doesn’t do a thing to get her off my back, then I resent him. And when he crushes poor Rog, I resent him more. I know what she’s doing. She’s cutting us loose from him. Uncontested possession. Anyway, I’ll tell you one thing. This is the last cruise of the Kayd family. As a happy united little group at least. Rog can keep taking it if he wants to. Leila, maybe we ought to jump ship in Nassau and fly back home.”

“Mean it?”

“Mmmm. I don’t know. It’s nice to think about.”

Leila sighed. “There’s not enough cruise left to make it worthwhile to stir up the fuss. Let’s stiff it out, kid. Let’s show ’em we’re tough. Honey, I have to get into that water before I begin to smoke.”

In the late afternoon of that day at Allen’s Cay, with Bix and Staniker still not back, Carolyn napping, Stella reading in the shade of a tarp Roger had rigged over a part of the cockpit deck, Leila swam ashore again and wandered, looking for shells. She came upon Roger standing in the shallows and casting out over the reef where Stel had paddled before lunch, using light spinning gear. When she asked him if he was having any luck, he lifted a stringer of gaudy fish out of the shallows and said, “Mary Jane’ll know which of these can go in the pot.”

Fifty feet further along the shore she came upon big and curious animal tracks and called to Rog in an excited voice. He came hurrying and looked and said, “Hey now! Garry said there might be some on this cay. Iguana. This groove is where his tail drags. Let’s see where he went.”

“But those feet look pretty big. Don’t they bite?”

“Garry said they’re timid unless you corner them and try to grab them. He said there used to be thousands and thousands up and down the Exumas. But they’re delicious. Like chicken.”

“Lizard steaks? Gaaah!”

“Come on.”

They followed the track for several hundred yards, losing them in the rocks then picking them up again in a sandy patch further along. At last they lost them for good. He had driven a driftwood sliver into the arch of his foot, in the middle of the sole. He sat on a flat stone, and she knelt and picked carefully at it with thumbnail and fingernail until at last she got a firm grip on it and pulled it free. She held it up in triumph and said, “You will walk again!”

He laughed. His teeth looked very white in the saddle brown of his lean face. Of all aboard he was the only one to take a tan as deep as Staniker’s. He had dark hair, like Stella’s, and the same mobile sensitivity of feature, the same hint of vulnerability. Yet he was unflawed in any physical way, slender, muscular, moving with sureness and precision and grace, except when he had to perform any task when his father was watching him. He wore pale blue briefs, a ragged hat from the Nassau straw market.